askagamedev

[askagamedev]

Maybe I'm imagining it, but it feels like AAA games have been more likely to be delayed after Cyberpunk. Do you think that game's huge imbroglio at launch has gotten other teams more time to QA before launching to similar problems?

There's still a lot of games that get released each year and most of them don't make the news for delays, they just release and move on. Here's a list of titles that shipped this year and did not have publicized delays:

Mario Kart World

DK Bananza

Kingdom Come Deliverance II

Civ 7

Like a Dragon: Pirate Yakuza in Hawaii

Monster Hunter Wilds

Fatal Fury: City of the Worlds

Forza Horizon 5

Doom: The Dark Ages

Elden Ring Nightreign

These are all AAA game releases from 2025 so far. In addition to these, we can also expect to see our annual Call of Duty, EA Sports titles, and 2k Sports titles release on time, because they always do. How many AAA games have been delayed this year? Do you think it is more or fewer than these? The majority of game releases don't get delayed. The news tends to report on the ones that do, so it just feels like there's a lot more than there really are.

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[askagamedev]

So I was having an interesting discussion with someone on the topic of animation clipping, & I thought since I'm not a game developer, I'd ask someone who is.

So my question is, is it true that more scripted or "canned" interactions between two characters leads to less clipping than say if there are no canned interactions at all? Bc part of their design, is to create more visual accuracy, correct?

So in other words, is a game with a more scripted gameplay style, more likely to have less collision detecting, since one would think that more scripted gameplay leads to more accurate animation clipping. Or is that not accurate?

Here's the thing - animations don't inherently have any sort of [collision detection]. They're a lot like shadow puppets - they have no mass, they have no physics, they just exist as projections onto a screen. Animations just exist in space - they'll pass through anything that occupies that same space because there's no actual matter that can collide.

Since shadow puppets have no mass, they can't physically interact with anything. We can pretend to have them interact by acting as if they were affected by something - a punch, a throw, a kiss, a hug, etc. This is what animators do - they sculpt motion over time and try to line things up if they can. "Canned" interactions are basically paired or group animations that are designed to play simultaneously in order to make the overall motion believable. A shoulder throw won't be believable if the victim being thrown doesn't move in tandem with the attacker doing the throwing. We also often have generic reactions (e.g. getting punched in the face, getting shot, getting knocked down, etc.) but those don't look as good as tailored animations meant to go together.

Paired interactions are more expensive to build than generic animations - you need to build the animation for the skeletons of the performers, which means that it won't work for a different skeleton, and those paired animations can only be used together under specific circumstances (e.g. a shoulder throw shouldn't be done if there isn't enough space for the victim to land on the ground). This is one reason why Call of Duty's executions work - everybody uses the same skeleton, so the same animations can be played on every character. This won't work in a game where different characters have different skeletons - the normal shoulder throw animations won't work if one character is a pixie and the other is a dragon.

Beyond this, there's also the issue of clothing and character model. The animations might not clip, but enormous chunks of material on the character models (like flashy armor) will clip through if the animations don't account for those things. This is one reason why you often see clipping issues during in-game cinematics where the player's flashy wardrobe causes clipping issues because the animators never expected the player's shoulder pads to be as enormous as they are.

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[askagamedev]

So Overwatch has gone into emergency maintenance, so the game is entirely unavailable. What kind of problems would require the entire server to be halted without warning?

There's usually only one reason to do emergency maintenance and that's securing some kind of vulnerability in the servers. This can be some kind of critical system update (e.g. the cloud services push some critical update) or it could be an emergency patch to fix a game exploit of some kind in the game software, but it's almost always some kind of security fix being deployed.

There's one other kind of situation that might necessitate emergency maintenance, but it's super rare - there might be some kind of actual physical problem at the data center that needs immediate attention. Hardware will eventually fail and things will break down. Acts of God, like a tornado, earthquake, or building collapse can wreck a bunch of physical servers. This usually doesn't happen since they often use the regular server maintenance windows to swap out faulty or broken hardware, but data center failure has happened in the past.

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[askagamedev]

With all the layoffs and studio closings/restructuring of the last few years, have there been any changes in higher level decision making? From, say, department leads to executives? Is AAA game making going to stabilize any time soon?

Game development is cyclical and typically lags behind the overall economic trends by a year or two because of the development time needed to actually take a game from pitch to launch. What this means is that players have primarily been seeing the results of the "boom" expansion era of 2020-2022 finally reaching shelves in the form of games like XDefiant, Concord, Marathon, and the like, and will soon begin seeing the "bust" contraction that started in 2023.

This is because a lot of investment money was pumped into games from 2020-2022, which fueled these games. After the waves of layoffs and the funding drying up, we're almost certainly going to see fewer big game releases from here on out. Most of those will likely be tried-and-true established franchises like Call of Duty, Pokemon, Madden, and so on. This will likely continue for the next few years thanks to the more experimental and risky game projects from 2023 until now have mostly been cancelled.

This has a side effect of pushing a lot of veteran game devs into the indie space. I suspect that we'll see more interesting indie games and a rennaisance of indie darlings over the next couple of years. Once economic headwinds look more favorable, publishers will start investing more into new and experimental games again, leading to more interesting AAA offerings once again - likely built on the core of some of the more successful indie offerings that have sprung up in the meantime.

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[askagamedev]

Hi,

I have a question that might seem weird. The question is about video game characters/enemies. Some enemies in video games are described as completely invincible. Does that simply mean that these characters lack a programed way of defeating them or are they also in reality completely invincible and that they will exist even when the video/computer games are destroyed and when the data also is destroyed?

I know this question might seem very strange, even insane, but I have anxiety about this and that is the reason why I am asking you as an expert.

Best regards,

Christian

Don't worry, Christian - you're far from the only person unfamiliar with how computer software works. A software program is really a large set of explicit instructions to the computer on how to use data. Those data might be character models, animations, sound effects, visual effects, environments, lighting, damage tables, experience tables, loot tables, and so on and so forth. Most data in computer memory is erased when the computer is turned off. This includes "invincible" game characters - everything is just 1s and 0s in memory, and turning everything off resets it all to zero. This is why most MMOGs and live service games have weekly maintenance periods, we're turning off the servers and turning them back on again in order to clear out any rogue data and starting over again.

A character in a game will only react in the ways it has been programmed to. We have to add damage effects one by one to a character - play a hit reaction animation, subtract this much health, handle death or dying when health reaches zero, disable player input when playing the damage animation, etc. - in order for things to happen. If we don't add the hit reaction, the character might take damage but not display anything. If we don't add the health subtraction, the character will never die because it will never pass the dying condition - health less than or equal to zero. If, for example, the dying check only checks health equal to zero but we somehow reduce health to negative numbers, the dying can also get skipped over. This is a bug (unintended behavior) and should be corrected, either to make sure health never drops below zero (e.g. set it to zero if it would go below) or allow for the system to handle negative health.

A character marked as "invincible" could be set never to take damage at all, in which case it wouldn't die or play hit reactions. In the game I'm working on, we have two different versions - "god" mode where damage is bypassed completely, and "demigod" mode where health cannot fall below 1 so that we can still test all of the damage features. A character marked as god or demigod in my game only bypasses damage and death handling in game, it doesn't stop a non-standard game over (e.g. a scripted game end) or other ways of ending the game (quitting to desktop). I hope this answers your question!

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[askagamedev]

If you're making a game with a bunch of rules which interact in ultimately very complicated ways (mtg, balatro, minecraft, whatever), are there any methods or even gut check ways to check for infinites? Sure some infinites almost always wind up happening, but you don't want it to be trivially easy. So, like, try to always have a decrement? Be super careful with recursions? Things like that.

With games that are based on combinations of things and continues to expand, you get a combinatoric explosion - it really isn't anywhere near reasonable to test every combination in that kind of situation. We just don't have that kind of development time, and it wouldn't be worth it even if we did.

Infinite combos are not really that bad, all things considered. In Magic, for example, there are lots of infinite combos that require three or more cards on the field. Because they require multiple cards, answers like removal, counter-magic, or just winning before the infinite combo is assembled are all absolutely valid options for any opponent. They provide a fun way for players to express how they wish to play ("assembling the combo" is a fun in-game goal to try to achieve).

What's far more important is that everything is properly costed. Infinite combos that win the game aren't inherently bad, but infinite combos that are easy to initiate and hard to find counter play for are troublesome. It isn't the infinite combo itself that is troublesome, it's how easy the combo is to assemble. By making the combo more difficult to assemble - usually by tweaking costs or increasing vulnerability to counter play - we can preserve the fun of assembling and winning with the infinite combo while still allowing for a reasonable competitive metagame. We can do this by making certain combo pieces more expensive to cast (buying time for the opponent to build their own resources and possibly win) or by making them more vulnerable to removal or counterplay, e.g. adding "hate" pieces that can counter the combo if it happens, or removal that can stop the combo in its tracks.

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[askagamedev]

What are uncommon/unique reasons you see a game get the axe?

One project I worked on got cancelled because the lead engineer on the project and main technical architect had a heart attack and passed away. There wasn't anyone else to step in and carry the project forward, so the higher-ups cancelled it. I was already on my way to a new studio by then, but I heard about it after the fact from former coworkers.

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[askagamedev]

What are some common reasons on why games are cancelled/freezed, and what can we do to avoid it? Is it bad product management? Developers underestimating tasks? Clients always wanting to add something into the product, and we not being able to say 'no'?

In these situations, there are two main kind of reasons why a game project gets put on hold or cancelled. The first is that reasons by the project team itself. The second is for reasons greater than the project itself.

Every game project has some kind of planned schedule. Each of the major phases of development, from concept to initial design to preproduction to production, is marked by a green light meeting for the people funding the project to review the progress and determine whether the game is meeting its goals at that point of development. Sometimes the project gets stuck going in circles, sometimes the leadership doesn't have a clear vision of what the game will be, sometimes there just isn't creative agreement on the team. Lots of problems can arise that cause the game not to hit its goals. If the game is behind schedule and doesn't hit its goals, it may be held up and told to go back and fix this or that, or improve and try again. If a project fails to pass these gates too many times or the funding for it runs out, the game can be cancelled.

Then there are reasons greater than the project itself that can affect a game project. If the publisher bet big on some other game release and is suddenly revenue is way lower than expected, the games that are still in incubation can get cancelled in order to save money and try to save the company. If a particular executive leaves who particularly fancied the project, it's also easy for such a project to get cancelled. Economic situations might call for a publicly traded company to cut costs, and any project that isn't shipping within two years might get cancelled. A publisher might get acquired by another company, in which case layoffs and project cancellations typically ensue.

One thing you'll probably notice about these is that there's precisely nothing a player can really do about any of these circumstances. These are all decisions made far above our heads and we are individually powerless to stop them from happening. It is unfortunate that this is how things are, but it's the truth - business is business, and there's more than a little luck needed for the completion of a successful development project. We can't blame ourselves because we're not the ones making these decisions.

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[askagamedev]

This may be answerable in an archive post but tumblr search…

I have an idea for a game, a 2-D rpg I would like to try to solo-dev. I don’t have prior dev experience. What would be a good tool to use for my first foray into amateur game making?

Short answer - since you have no experience at all with anything, use [RPG Maker]. If you can't afford the retail price, wait for a Steam sale - it goes on sale quite often. For a longer answer as to why you should use RPG Maker, read on.

In the words of the inestimable Gin Rummy from the Boondocks, we can divide all knowledge in the world into one of three categories:

Known knowns - things we know

Known unknowns - things we realize that we don't know

Unknown unknowns - things we don't realize that we don't know

The process of learning is the conversion of the known unknowns (e.g. how to code) and unknown unknowns (things you probably didn't realize you'd have to do) into known knowns. The best way to do this is to start small with as limited a scope as you can, and then gradually increase as you level up and learn to do more things.

A toolset like RPG Maker does a lot of the lifting for you by providing a map editor, event editor, and content editor to allow you to work with a bunch of common systems that already exist in 2D RPGs. You'll learn a lot of the things that go into a video game from just having those tools and playing with them. There's also a lot of assets right out of the box, so you don't have to build a bunch of them on your own. If you want to expand past that, there's a lot of documentation and tutorials available online for making all kinds of additional features and content. As you get used to building things and creating content, you can slowly expand your scope to see what else you can do beyond that.

As for the project to do - build something very simple - a single story, with a handful of characters, that has a beginning, middle, and end. I suggest something simple like an episode of your favorite TV show. If you're feeling frisky, make some branching storylines for that episode. Whatever you do, don't try to make your magnum opus epic whatever for your first project. You're learning how to make stuff first. You're going to make mistakes, you're going to learn new things, and you're going to improve your skills. Most of all, you'll start turning those unknown unknowns into known knowns and known unknowns so that you can make a plan to start figuring out what else you need to do in order to make what you want to happen. Level up, improve your skills, and then start tackling bigger challenges. Good luck.

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[askagamedev]

Do you have any thoughts as as a designer Magic the Gathering becoming a grab bag of IPs? How about as a player of MTG given how often you referenced it in your posts?

Any given game can be broken up into two major parts - what I call the mechanics (the rules and specifics of the game) and the fiction (the story, characters, lore, and such). Games can vary quite a bit between how important the mechanics are and how important the fiction is. Games like Chess, Tetris, or Basketball have very little to do with any real fiction. Narrative-heavy games like visual novels and immersive simulators lean much more heavily on the fiction than the mechanics. What bringing many crossover IPs does is muddy MtG's fiction without necessarily touching its mechanics.

It's pretty obvious that many players out there have responded positively to these kind of crossovers. Magic is hardly the first - Fortnite has built its entire model on being a platform for crossovers of all kinds, Call of Duty's multiplayer has become a similar world of crossover IPs, and mobile games have had brand IP collaborations for almost as long as we've had mobile games. It's generally a good thing for the business (so far), but it's hard to un-ring that bell once it's been rung especially in formats where all cards are legal.

For those who only care about the fiction, it's not a big deal - they can choose not to play with the fiction they dislike. For those who only care about the mechanics, it's also not a big deal - cards are essentially the mana costs, types, and effects. The art and the characters don't matter, only the efficiency and synergy in the deck. But for those players who care about both, the amount of sadness they'll feel is commensurate with how much they care.

Those who have made Magic The Gathering a large part of their lives growing up are likely to feel the most sorrow about it. I truly sympathize with them, but it's also part of the game's evolution over time (like how Magic is now much more stringent with its art direction than it once was). It's always important for me to maintain some emotional distance with products for this reason. I lament the changes with my friends but, at the of the day, we aren't friends because we play, we're play because we're friends. We can find other games to play, or we can enact house rules, or we can just try continuing on.

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[askagamedev]

What did you think you would be doing the most as a game developer when you were studying/trying to get into the profession versus what you did you actually end up doing the most once you got the job?

When I was a child, I dreamed of making the levels and coming up with cool features and abilities for characters in games. What kind of weapon, what kind of ability, what kind of item, what kind of bad guy, and so on and so forth. As I got older and learned more about how stuff worked, I thought I would be coming up with things like the characters, story, and the overall look and feel of the game. I believed I would be the one telling everyone else what to do, the quintessential "idea person".

Once I got to the university level and started taking computer science courses to learn how to make my ideas reality, I started thinking about how I would apply what I learned to making my ideas reality. A lot of seemingly-unrelated classes like linear algebra and vector math were actually very helpful in understanding classes like Computer Graphics and how it all works. Data Structures actually ended up being an incredibly important class. Ultimately, I took a software engineering course that required me to build a semester-long project. I chose to build a Half-Life game mod with a small team of others. It was during that course that I actually learned what game dev is really like (building features, adding assets, fixing bugs, tuning values, working with a team) and I realized I really liked it - so much so that I continued developing mods on my own after the class concluded.

Since graduation, the things I've worked on day to day in my career have mostly been doing the same things I learned in that software engineering class - I'm building features, adding assets, fixing bugs, tuning values, and working with a team. The features I build are bigger and more complex, the assets I use are higher fidelity and more complex, the tuning I do is more involved and complex, and the teams that I work with are bigger and more professional, but it's still in the same style as before - I can see that I've leveled up a lot and have a much greater understanding and ability than before, but it's still the same kind of skills involved.

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[askagamedev]

What are other “we use X program for y tasks” that are standard in AAA game dev?

Beyond Visual Studio, there are a few common software tools we use.

We use Jira pretty as our task-tracking tool for bugs and tasks - I've used it at multiple studios now, though it isn't as ubiquitous as Visual Studio. I've seen competitors like Trello and Hansoft used at various studios as well.

We usually use Perforce for our asset versioning. It's able to handle both plaintext and binary assets. I haven't really seen any other solutions in use in my experience, though I have heard of other studios using some other options.

The most common tool we use for game design is actually Excel. A huge amount of [game design work is handled via spreadsheets and the formulae there]. Some studios use Google Sheets instead since it's pretty similar (and free), but we all inevitably some sort of spreadsheet tool with macro capability is needed in order to handle all of the various design math in content creation.

Every studio uses some kind of instant messenger tool for team members to talk to each other directly, though the specific tool varies a lot with the studio. These days most are using Slack, but I've seen studios use MS Teams, and back in the day we even used tools like Yahoo Messenger, MSN, or even Skype.

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[askagamedev]

Hey, I just read your post about console development and the engineering effort it takes to use the extra bells and whistles a console provides. I was wondering if you had any knowledge or theories why more games haven't taken advantage of features like sampler feedback streaming. Memory always seems to be a stretched resource on consoles and this feature is claimed to improve memory utilization by over 2x. It seems like taking advantage of console specific hardware happens less these days outside of something like VRR or PSSR on the PS5 pro.

Thank you for taking the time with this and many other questions. Love your posts.

Thanks for reading and your kind words. I'll be the first to say that I'm no graphics programmer, so I can't really say anything to the specifics and utilization of a specific feature. That said, I'll try to address your question the best I can. Generally, there are two core reasons that we don't utilize specific hardware features that we could potentially use:

First - it's usually because we're still supporting last-gen hardware that doesn't necessarily have this feature, so we need to be more careful about where we spend our performance optimization resources. Getting last-gen performant is a much bigger undertaking than getting current-gen performant. Spending a bunch of engineering time optimizing this feature that doesn't help our game on last-gen consoles would likely be better spent on finding optimizations that help across the board, especially if the last gen still has a lot of players. This particular reason phases out over time, as more and more last-gen players convert to the new generation, but it's a really big issue in the first two or three years after the launch of a new hardware generation.

Second - it's usually because not all of the hardware that we're targeting supports that particular feature. The PS3 had their special SPU Cell processors that nobody else had, which meant that any work done to optimize games to run on those Cell processors was totally wasted on the PC, X360, or Wii. This is totally fine if we're targeting PS3 as an exclusive title, but it's not very resource-efficient if we're aiming at the roughly 40/40/20 split between PS3/X360/PC that most multiplatform AAA games saw at the time.

You probably noticed that the calculus here is primarily "Will this effort translate to significant gain across all of our target platforms?" We only have so many graphics engineers (some of the most expensive and sought-after roles in the game industry!) and they only have so much time to work their magic. We try to ensure that whatever we task these folks with is the most efficient use of their limited time. That's the real answer - we only have so much time/resource to spend over the course of development, so we try to get the most we can out of what we have.

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[askagamedev]

has there been any transition from Visual Studio + Visual Assist X, or is that still the standard? i've tested CLion and Rider, but always seem to go back to Visual Studio.

Not everyone uses Visual Assist (though it is helpful), but everybody uses Visual Studio. The last time my employer used something other than visual studio was when we had to use Metrowerks Code Warrior for PSP development, which should give you an idea of how long ago that was. Visual Studio is pretty much the standard in the game industry.

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[askagamedev]

On the follow up to the gambling question, have you seen industries you work with try to skirt around or cheat regulations, such as various car companies cheating at emission regulation tests?

I've never seen it myself at any studio I've worked at. I can't say it never happens, but I've never seen it on any project I've worked on, and I've been working on games with randomized rewards for over a decade. Many of the games I've worked on had cash shops, and I've worked on many of the loot systems involved with the distribution of these items. When we test these systems, we go for several million loot distribution trials and then analyze these results to make sure that our distributions are reasonable. Generally speaking, the internet never forgets and it's hard to regain the trust of spending players if we're found out to be manipulating the numbers.

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[askagamedev]

Since you have worked in both gambling and games, how much do each “fix” the RNG? For example, how much are there “guaranteed wins” baked into loot boxes or slot machines to keep engagement (say a legendary skin/a win every 100 pulls even if the raw RNG would not have given it)? Conversely, how often are there “you can’t get a legendary skin/a payout unless you pull 100 times regardless of what the RNG would have given you?”

Honestly, a lot less than you think. Most of the time, we actually fix the RNG in the player's favor in order to avoid the more frustrating events. This includes loot systems that will force quest items to drop after N attempts without a success, and often massaging hit rolls behind the curtain to give players better chances than displayed.

For things like gacha, it isn't worth it to ham-hand things because it doesn't actually matter - any student of statistics knows that with a large enough sample size, things approach the mean. Any gacha game will have millions of players each doing hundreds or even thousands of pulls. As long as the overall distribution of the SSR units over those pulls closely approximates the given percentage chosen (1%, 2%, 0.5%, whatever), it doesn't matter if somebody goes for a thousand pulls without getting his waifu or if he gets it on his free pull. If there are 3 million players each pulling ~30 times each, that's 90 million pulls. A 1% distribution will see roughly 900,000 of that specific SSR distributed among those 90 million pulls. Some players will be extra lucky and get multiple, while many will be unlucky and get nothing. It doesn't really matter to the devs whether a specific player is one of the lucky ones or the unlucky ones, only that the general population is happy enough. If the gacha rates make too many people unhappy, the developers add a second-chance mechanic, usually a "sparking" mechanic where players can get to choose the SSR unit they want after some number of failed pulls. Fire Emblem Heroes actually does this - if you can somehow go for 100 pulls without a single SSR unit, the next circle will be guaranteed all SSRs. There's actually a super low chance, a little over 1/500 chance of it happening.

For actual casino gambling, there is no messing with the RNG at all. The RNG must be digitally signed by a government-approved testing lab across many hundreds of years of tests (multiple RNG simulating computers running tests for weeks at a time), and that RNG with that specific checksum/signature must be certified to be used in gambling machines. This is because any messing with the RNG at the casino level means the revocation of licenses by the government and basically destroying the business upon which it is built.

This is the same reason gacha companies don't mess with the RNG too much either - in any country where they must post rates, any statistical evidence that could bring them legal compliance trouble simply isn't worth it. These companies have millions of players, often who pull hundreds or thousands of times. That's a lot of statistical data out there for anybody who wants to collate it. Any sort of statistical discrepancy will come out with a sample size that big, so it's just not worth it to us to manipulate it when the consequences are legal.

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[askagamedev]

Is direct console development (for a multi-platform title) only about certification requirements and console specific bug fixing, or is there more to it?

There's two sides to console development. There's the software certification side, which is what you asked about - all of the cert requirements and fixing console-specific and certification bugs like using the proper glyphs, using the copyrighted terms, and so on. The other side is actually setting up the software at the engine level to interface with the hardware drivers and utilize the game hardware. This tends to be the really crunchy programming work done by senior software engineers who really love playing with hardware.

All software needs to interact with the actual hardware at some point - there must be data sent to the hardware and the hardware has to operate on those data. There are often many layers of abstraction between the hardware and the software - most programmers don't need to think about how the math is done, only that the math is done. It's the experts who work with the hardware that do what they can to squeeze additional performance out of that hardware in the time they have allotted to do so.

One such example would be back in the PS3 days. The PS3 famously had a bunch of "synergistic processing units" (SPUs) that could do a bunch of math very quickly, but required a special half-float format to operate. Most game dev teams didn't bother to utilize those SPUs for that reason - it took a lot of additional effort to set up the software to store data in that format, send them to the SPUs for calculation, and then convert those data back to the normal floating point precision numbers we usually use. Some teams like Naughty Dog's Uncharted team, however, took full advantage of the SPUs and used them for the post-processing effects to make Uncharted 2 look so good.

This is the other side of console development - writing code to take advantage of the specific hardware bells and whistles and squeezing out better visuals and performance from the hardware that's waiting to be used.

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